“Obedience to the Unenforceable”
It is one of the drawbacks of being rich and reasonably celebrated. It happens occasionally to Astors, and with dreary regularity to Fords and Rockefellers. They are always getting letters from people bearing the same name, but of whom they have never heard, claiming kinship. The letters come from strange way stations around the world, and sometimes the would-be cousins live near at hand. The Manhattan telephone directory lists several “unreal” Rockefellers along with the real ones. And, as often as not, the claimants can offer legitimate and documented proof that they are relatives. But, whenever a new member of a prominent family shows up, with or without credentials, it is a distressing event. Because, in nearly every case, the “relative” comes with an outstretched arm and an upturned palm. “Dear Uncle …” began a letter received by one of the Vanderbilts not long ago and, after a few amenities, continued:
… My Mother who was your Own Mothers cousin (in cradle with her when they was two) always tell me when things turn bad for me you will lend a hand. Last fall when I broke my back …
And so it familiarly went.
Fortunately for the American clan of Auchincloss, this cannot happen to them. It is one of several singular facts about this singular tribe. Every one of the hundred-odd Auchinclosses now living in the United States is a member of the family, and they are all accounted for. There are no unreal Auchinclosses. And yet, a number of years ago, Mr. Hugh D. Auchincloss—or “Hughdie” as he is pet-named in the family—received a curious communication from an undertaker calling himself Auchincloss. The man was planning, or so he said, to do some advertising along the lines of “Let Auchincloss give you a classy funeral,” or “Be. Buried Like An Aristocrat Would—By Auchincloss.” What, the undertaker wanted know, did Mr. Hugh D. Auchincloss think of that proposal? Hughdie Auchincloss was, quite naturally, alarmed. Was the man attempting a kind of blackmail? Such advertising would be embarrassing, to say the least.
Hughdie Auchincloss weighed the matter carefully for several days. Then he remembered something his father had once said to him: “You are not responsible for your relatives. You are only responsible for your friends.” Hugh-die Auchincloss ignored the communication. The man was not heard from again.
If it is true that Society in the United States is based on nothing but money, then the Auchinclosses, again, are something of an exception. Though Auchinclosses have been prominent in Society for generations (a good seven, in fact), and though most of them have been, as Louis Auchincloss puts it, “respectably affluent,” there has never been an Auchincloss family fortune as such. Indeed, if there ever had been, it would—unless strictest rules of primogeniture had been adhered to—have long ago been dissipated by division and taxation. It is rather like the Auchinclosses to have made assets out of these facts which, in other families, would have been considered distinct disadvantages. When John Winthrop Auchincloss (an uncle of Hugh D.) built his Newport house, “Hammersmith Farm,” in 1892, he did not build it on Bellevue Avenue, Newport’s fashionable “ocean side” where all the greatest mansions are, but on the Narragansett Bay side, or “wrong side” of Newport. And “Hammersmith Farm” itself—though a very large house and a handsome example of the shingle style, surrounded by seventy-five acres of land—is a dollhouse compared with the gilt and marble palaces for which Newport is famous. And yet, since John Winthrop Auchincloss was who he was, he made a number of Vanderbilts, Astors, and Goelets who had houses on Bellevue Avenue feel, uncomfortably, that they had done it all wrong. Perhaps John Winthrop had hoped they would feel this way; perhaps not. But such, by the end of the last century, had become the mystical power of the Auchincloss name in Society.
It all started in 1803, when the first Auchincloss, also named Hugh, set foot on these shores, having sailed from Greenock, Scotland, aboard the ship Factor. He was twenty-three years old, and enterprising. Within a short time he operated his own dry-goods store in downtown Manhattan. In 1806, he married a Philadelphia girl of Scottish descent named Ann Anthony Stuart whose father, though not wealthy, was a man of property. His will shows that he was able to bequeath his heirs such items as a “gold watch,” “gold jacket-buttons,” and a “Negro wench” to each of his children.
Hugh and Ann Auchincloss’s was the first of many auspicious Auchincloss weddings. Hugh, meanwhile, was parsimonious, persevering, Presbyterian. Obituaries of him describe him in ominous negatives. He was not tightfisted, they insist He was not disagreeable and mean. That was just his appearance. “The fiber of his nature was strong rather than delicate,” stated his funeral orator, “hence some misapprehended him as blunt and harsh. The deceased was not a man of smooth words or disguised flatteries.…” It would seem that the Auchinclosses, at that point, had a long way to go. In a tintype of the first Hugh, he certainly looks sour, his mouth turned down in a perfectly inverted crescent. In her tintype, Ann Anthony Stuart Auchincloss merely looks glum. Because her maiden name was Stuart, her grandson, John Winthrop, had the crest of the Royal House of Stuart emblazoned on his silverware. His claim to the crest is particularly fuzzy. Ann Anthony Stuart Auchincloss was a tiny woman, so diminutive that she crawled into the family cradle to nurse each of her thirteen children. She was also, alas, no beauty. The prominent “Auchincloss nose” appears to have descended from her, and therefore should properly be called a Stuart nose.
Of Ann and Hugh Auchincloss’s thirteen children, only one—the first John—had the proper dynastic talent to produce male heirs bearing the family name. Of his twelve brothers and sisters there are no descendants whatever today. Yet John is responsible for a remarkable circumstance. From him descend all the Auchinclosses in America—dozens upon dozens of them—with the exception of those in the embalming business. An Auchincloss family tree, prepared in 1957, lists the names of some three hundred and thirty descendants of John and, of these, fiftyseven have been males named Auchincloss. Genetically, this is an uncommonly high proportion. The family tree lists ten Hugh Auchinclosses, fifteen Jameses, eight Stuarts, seven Anns, twenty Elizabeths, and quite a few Johns, Williams, and Douglases. Included are ten sets of twins. More of each have been born, of course, since the tree was compiled. As happens in large families, cousins have married cousins, but this has not seemed to affect the rate of production. The first John had nine children, seven of them boys. In the second and third generations, multiple marriages begin to take place, giving Auchinclosses complicated step- and half-relationships.
Two marriages per Auchincloss today are commonplace, and three are no surprise. One pair of Auchincloss sisters married the same man, one Benjamin Betner, though not, naturally, at the same time. (The family tree delicately overlooks this somewhat unusual circumstance.) Hugh D. Auchincloss himself was married, first, to Maya Chrapovitsky, the daughter of a Russian naval officer, and their son, another Hugh, is called “Yusha,” a rough Russian equivalent of his name. Hughdie was married, second, to Mrs. Nina Gore Vidal, the ex-wife of an aircraft executive, by whom he had two children, Thomas Gore and Nina Gore Auchincloss (and, for the duration of the marriage, had a stepson named Gore Vidal). Third, he was married to Mrs. Janet Lee Bouvier, mother of two Bouvier girls, Caroline Lee and Jacqueline Lee. By the former Mrs. Bouvier, he had two more children, Janet Jennings and James Lee Auchincloss. Mrs. Vidal was the daughter of T. P. Gore, the famous blind Senator from Oklahoma. “Thus,” says Hughdie Auchincloss, “I was on two occasions connected with the United States Senate.”
More striking than the Auchincloss divorce record is the family record for marrying well. Auchinclosses themselves don’t like to be reminded of this fact—which delights their in-laws—but it is true: in each Auchincloss generation, there has been at least one brilliant marriage to carry the family upward onto new plateaux of prestige and privilege. No sooner had the first Hugh married Ann Anthony Stuart than the advantages of the union began to appear. What little Ann lacked in looks, she made up for in Scotch doughtiness and spirit. When war was declared between England and the United States in 1812, it found Hugh Auchincloss, still a British subject, an enemy alien. All aliens were ordered removed “at least forty miles from tide water so that they might not be able to render aid or give comfort to the enemy,” and Hugh Auchincloss was promptly interned up the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie, far from his dry-goods store. His wife then took matters into her own hands. She boarded a stage for Washington—a three-and-a-half days’ trip—determined to take her husband’s case to the top, to the President of the United States himself, if need be. Once in Washington, she hired a hack to take her to the White House. On the way, her driver pointed to a pedestrian and said, “There goes Mr. Monroe, the Secretary of State.” “Stop the hack!” cried Mrs. Auchincloss. She bounded out, confronted Monroe on the street, and demanded to see President Madison. Somewhat startled, no doubt, the Secretary agreed that she could come to the White House the following morning.
When she told her story to Madison he was at first unimpressed. But, according to her great-grandson John Auchincloss, “She stayed in Washington about a week, making such a nuisance of herself that the President and the Secretary of State, to get rid of her, for the country was at war, issued an executive order allowing her husband to return to New York and resume his occupation. Ever since, Auchinclosses have been unafraid of storming the halls of the mighty.
The exception that had been made in the single case of Hugh Auchincloss did not endear him to the other Britishers interned in Poughkeepsie. They kicked up a mighty fuss and, before long, the pressure was such that the President was forced to rescind his order. But this time, at least, Hugh Auchincloss was prepared. He had fitted himself out with a mule team and wagon and, instead of making for Poughkeepsie, he headed west, as a traveling dry-goods store. By the war’s end, he had peddled his way as far as Louisville, Kentucky, and was a rich man.
From that point on, Auchinclosses have been rubbing elbows steadily with the highly placed in Society and government. The eldest son of Hugh and Ann (the first John) made what can only be described as an imposingly advantageous marriage. Though his bride wore the unprepossessing name of Elizabeth Buck, her pedigree virtually bristled with great Colonial names—Winthrop, Dudley, Wainwright, Mainwaring, and Saltonstall. Her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was John Winthrop, called “The Great Immigrant,” Governor of Massachusetts and one of the founders of Harvard. Two other many-times great-grandfathers, Thomas Dudley and Joseph Dudley, were Massachusetts Governors; another John Winthrop was the first Governor of Connecticut, and still another was Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. One could go on and on citing the distinguished ancestors of Elizabeth Buck and, when one is talking Auchincloss family history, one does. One of her ancestors was Sir Richard Saltonstall of Huntwicke, and his wife—we are in the sixteenth century now—was said to have descended directly from William the Conqueror.
The late Charles C. Auchincloss, who took up genealogy as a hobby late in life, worked out an elaborate chart showing how William the Conqueror fitted into the family, and even Uncle Charlie’s greatest admirers admit that he had to use both ingenuity and a certain amount of imagination to come up with that relationship. His chart shows how today’s Auchinclosses are also directly described from the royal lines of England, Scotland and, for good measure, France, through King Philip II. Not one, but three of Elizabeth Buck Auchincloss’s ancestors—Sir Richard Saltonstall, Governor Winthrop, and Governor Dudley—arrived in Salem aboard the vessel Arabella in 1630. Charles Auchincloss liked to point out that families who arrived on the Mayflower really had not accomplished much until the passengers from the Arabella, “named after the daughter of a duke,” arrived to show the others what to do. Charles Auchincloss also used to somewhat infuriate his wife—who was the former Rosamond Saltonstall—by explaining, genealogically, how he, with his heavy dosage of Saltonstall stock, was really more of a Saltonstall than she was.
It is generally unwise, particularly with the older generation, to poke fun at the Auchinclosses’ ancient and regal family claims, but one person who has done so, albeit affectionately, has been Wilmarth Lewis, the author and Horace Walpole scholar, whose late wife was Annie Burr Auchincloss, a collateral descendant of, among others, Aaron Burr. Speaking at a family reunion in the ballroom of New York’s Colony Club (which Louis Auchincloss describes as “a tremendous feat, but more like a stockholders’ meeting than a family gathering), Mr. Lewis took the Auchincloss family tree lightly to task. Speaking to the hostess of the huge affair, the late Emma Jennings Auchincloss (mother of the present Hugh D.), he asked Aunt Emma if she recalled “dear cousin Charlemagne Auchincloss,” and “old Uncle Henry the Eighth.” Glancing at the Auchincloss charts, he noted that one of the Auchindosses had married a Smedberg—“obviously of an old New York family”—and wondered if, therefore, there wouldn’t be a good family reason to speak of “Cousin Noah,” and, perhaps, “dear Uncle Adam,” and “Aunt Eve.”
Nonetheless, with Elizabeth Buck’s entrance into the family, the Auchincloss name assumed a place in New York Society which it has never vacated. The couple built a spacious summer home in Newport, in then fashionable Washington Street, on the water’s edge. They had nine children, seven of them boys, but it was their eldest daughter, Sarah Ann, who made the first brilliant marriage in that generation. She wed James Coats of the Scottish thread-manufacturing family and, in rather short order, a number of the Auchincloss boys became American agents for Coats Thread, a profitable endeavor. Next, Edgar Stirling Auchincloss married Maria Sloan, daughter of the president of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad. John Winthrop Auchincloss married a Russell, another family prominent in New York and Newport, and—from a money standpoint, the best marriage of all—Hugh Dudley Auchincloss married Emma Brewster Jennings, whose father, Oliver B. Jennings, was a founder of the Standard Oil Company. Jennings and the first William Rockefeller married sisters named Goodsell, and therefore, Auchinclosses of the Hugh Dudley branch are first and second cousins of the William-branched Rockefellers.*
Talk about a social power structure! The Hugh Dudley, Edgar Stirling, and Sarah Auchincloss Coats branches of the family are the three rich branches, but the others have not done at all badly. A daughter of the John Winthrop branch married another Jennings, a cousin of the first—and a daughter of the Henry Buck line married a Colgate, of the toothpaste family. Today, the Auchinclosses are “the most marvelously connected family in New York,” according to a friend, occupying nearly two full pages of the New York Social Register, some forty-seven separate listings, compared with forty-two for Rockefellers, eight for Vanderbilts, and a mere two for Astors. This, of course, does not include Auchinclosses who have migrated to such far-flung cities as Honolulu. Through marriage, the Auchinclosses are now kin, in addition to Rockefellers, Sloans, Winthrops, Jenningses, Saltonstalls, and Smedbergs, to such other redoubtable families as the Frelinghuysens, the Van Rensselaers, the Cuttings, the Reids, the du Ponts, the Grosvenors, the Truslows, the Tiffanys, the Bundys, the Adamses, the Ingrahams, the Burdens, the Vanderbilts and, of course, the Kennedys.
One might call them the definitive family of American Society. They describe its limits, and its design. The lacy branches of the Auchincloss family tree spread across its entire landscape. The Auchinclosses have never married Roosevelts. On the other hand, when young Lewis Rutherfurd married Janet Auchincloss at Hammersmith Farm in 1966, it was realized that Rutherfurd’s step-grandmother, Lucy Rutherfurd, had for many years been F.D.R.’s mistress, making the Roosevelts seem somehow part of the family, or at least close.
It should not be inferred, because so many Auchincloss men married well-placed and wealthy ladies, that the men were fortune hunters. For the most part, Auchincloss men have been sober and industrious—whether as thread merchants, lawyers, bankers, or stockbrokers—and dutiful pillars of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The Auchinclosses have produced a distinguished doctor, the late Hugh—a cousin of the present Hugh D.—who was Chief of Surgery at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, and Professor of Surgery at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Even Auchincloss women have gone into business. Mrs. Maria Auchincloss Look, for example, was for several years the American packager and distributor of a product called “I-Snips,” an ice-cracking tool. Auchinclosses dislike being idle, and no one has demonstrated this better than Louis Auchincloss, who works full-time as a Wall Street lawyer and has turned out an imposing array of novels and short stories in his spare time.
“The Auchinclosses have always been a very nice family,” says one friend. As a member of the family puts it, “There have been several stupid Auchinclosses, but no cruel ones.” There have been but few playboys or scapegraces in the family, and a gentle air of good behavior surrounds them all. This reputation for piety and rectitude has added to their legend and their stature, and is an important ingredient in the Auchincloss style. “One was always a little in awe of them,” says a New York woman. “At least I was brought up to believe that if you saw an Auchincloss doing it it was right.”
In Bar Harbor, Maine, where the J. Howland Auchinclosses have long owned a summer place—grandly ignoring Bar Harbor’s fall from fashion—their neighbors for many years were the Archbolds, who lived just down the hill. The Archbolds, another Standard-Oil-founding family, are far richer than most Auchinclosses. Yet Archbolds tremble when Auchinclosses frown. At Bar Harbor, the Archbolds kept horses for their children, though the Auchinclosses did not. Horses involve stables, stables involve a manure pile, and a manure pile entails flies and certain odors. Lydia Archbold—now Mrs. Archbold Foote, a horsewoman of some note—recalls that one of the most agonizing duties of her childhood was writing her first social note. It was a note to Mrs. Auchincloss. Since they were Lydia’s horses, her mother explained, little Lydia should write to Mrs. Auchincloss apologizing for the way the manure pile smelled, and hoping that the scent did not make its way into the Auchincloss garden.
Auchinclosses have become arbiters of elegance and, in their quiet and unassuming way, standard-setters. Mrs. J. Howland Auchincloss recalls the years before she married into the clan, when she was Priscilla Stanton, and her parents occupied a brownstone opposite the first Hugh D. Auchinclosses in East Forty-ninth Street. The present Hughdie Auchincloss was then a baby of approximately the same age as Miss Stanton’s little brother, William, and Priscilla’s mother often posted her at the window to keep an eye on the Auchincloss house across the way. “Mrs. Auchincloss,” said Mrs. Stanton, “has a hospital-trained nurse for little Hughdie. And when you see that nurse take little Hughdie out in his carriage, I want you to tell me exactly what she has him dressed in.” Priscilla remembers running to her mother with such news as, “She has little Hughdie in his little fur coat and fur bonnet!” There was nothing to do but hurry out and buy a fur coat and bonnet for baby William.
So powerful is the Auchincloss name in Newport that, when it was decided to combine the coming-out party of Jacqueline Bouvier with a christening party for her half-brother—and invitations read, “Also honouring Mister James Lee Auchincloss”—baby Jamey received invitations to dinners, dances, and cocktail parties all over town.
In the summer of 1966, the most waited for event in Eastern Society was the Auchincloss-Rutherfurd wedding in Newport—he, tall, handsome, splendidly educated (Buckley, St. Paul’s, Princeton), and impeccably pedigreed (directly descended from Peter Stuyvesant, New York’s last Dutch Governor); she, like her step- and half-sisters, dark-haired and beautiful and, of course, “an Auchincloss,” Hughdie’s youngest daughter. Socially, it was a long way from another wedding of the same season—that of Luci Johnson to Pat Nugent. In fact, the only notice taken in Newport of the Johnson-Nugent nuptials was when someone commented, “In that heat? Will anyone go?”
While Washington sweltered, a crisp breeze blew across Narragansett Bay. The green lawns of Hammersmith Farm, where the reception was being held, swept down to the blue water’s edge. The family ponies romped in the fields, and the Black Angus herd posed decoratively against the sky, as, indeed, they are supposed to do. (The Black Angus are actually a decorative herd. Both Mr. and Mrs. Auchincloss like to look out their windows onto grazing animals and so, to indulge this fancy, Hughdie Auchincloss buys eighteen or twenty head each spring and sells them again in the fall, before returning to his winter home in Washington.) A white oval tent was set up on the lawn for the reception party. Inside, there was music and laughter and champagne and, outside, little John-John Kennedy, in the costume he had worn as a page (the bride was his mother’s half-sister)—blue linen shorts, white silk shirt, blue satin cummerbund, high white socks, black patent leather shoes with silver buckles—chased the Auchincloss ponies while a brace of Secret Service men chased him. (He had been a perfect page throughout the ceremony until the very end; as the wedding party was leaving the church, John-John could not resist throwing a quick punch into the ribs of a young contemporary.) As six hundred guests wandered in and out of the tent, through the spectacular gardens, admiring the dazzling sunshine of the day, the evident happiness of the young pair, and the auspiciousness of the match, everyone was saying that it was the most beautiful wedding anyone had ever seen. Then, suddenly, into the Bay, at the foot of the long cascade of lawn, swept the New York Yacht Club’s sailing cruise—hundreds of sails billowing, like a host of huge white butterflies composing a backdrop for the party. “How like the Auchinclosses to get this to happen—and for nothing,” someone murmured. And of course Janet Auchincloss, senior, had known that the cruise was scheduled, had hoped it would arrive to help decorate her daughter’s wedding. It did, and in the colors she had chosen for the wedding’s theme—blue and white.
“Obedience to the unenforceable.” It was a phrase that governed the life of Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, who died in 1947, and which governed the lives of many Auchinclosses before and after him. It might be said to be the motto—the moral law—of the family. “We’ve always been more like a fraternity than a family,” Louis Auchincloss once commented and, if so, this phrase is the fraternal password. Each of Dr. Auchincloss’s children and grandchildren was required to memorize the phrase as soon as he or she was able to talk, and so were all Dr. Auchincloss’s nieces, nephews, grandnieces, and grandnephews. The children were asked to repeat the phrase before sitting down at Dr. Auchincloss’s Sunday dinner table.
The phrase, which in Dr. Auchincloss’s opinion, encapsulated the code of a lady or a gentleman, is today carved in stone in the chapel of the Groton School, of which Dr. Auchincloss was a trustee. The words have gazed down upon a full generation of Groton boys, including a good many Auchinclosses. “Obedience to the unenforceable”—a principle first uttered in an address significantly titled, “Law and Manners” by Lord Moulton, a British jurist and parliamentarian, Minister of Munitions at the outbreak of the First World War—meant, as adapted by the Auchincloss family, that a man or woman’s first duty was to obey that which he cannot be forced to obey. Such matters as a person’s morals, or his human obligations, in other words, cannot ever be legislated by others. A government cannot regulate decency of thought and purpose; the right action cannot be found by consulting a rule book. Obedience to the unenforceable, Dr. Auchincloss reminded the children, is the great unwritten law of any worthwhile society, or Society, and each individual is the enforcer, and the only enforcer, of that unwritten law upon himself. “Obedience to the unenforceable” is, one might argue, a slightly more noble principle than that of noblesse oblige, and the Auchinclosses have, as a family, done their best to abide by it.
“Obedience to the unenforceable” has been the theme of life at Hammersmith Farm, where good behavior is expected to be automatic, and where one’s duties are expected to be assumed without question or complaint. Today the amenities of Hammersmith Farm are in the hands of soft-spoken, soft-slippered servants, but it was not always thus. When Janet and Hughdie Auchincloss were married, it was 1942, wartime, and among the other difficulties to be assumed by the new bride—such as helping her two young daughters make the transition to a new home and stepfather who already had three children of his own—was the problem of Hammersmith Farm itself. Janet Auchincloss’s mother-in-law had, as part of her staff, employed fourteen full-time gardeners to keep the Hammersmith landscape tidy; she had belonged to an era of Newport Society when gardens were placed a goodly hiking distance from the house, and they were part of a daily ritual: one strolled to the garden after lunch and, when there, sat in the shade of vast pergolas to be served tea brought on a wagon by the “second man.” In wartime Newport it was impossible to find a first man, much less a second and the fourteen gardeners were a quaint and distant memory.
Young Mrs. Auchincloss put her little girls to work—pruning rosebushes and fruit trees, clipping hedges, and cutting grass. It was very nearly a hopeless task (there were five hothouses of growing things), but the children tackled it with spirit. It would have been easier to give up the big place, but Hughdie Auchincloss was sentimentally attached to it, and still is. He was born there and says, without a trace of gloom, that he intends to die there.
Gradually, under Janet Auchincloss’s supervision, the scale of the gardening operation was reduced. The huge old gardens were photographed for posterity, then plowed under. A smaller garden was built next to the house, considerably shortening the old garden trip. But there were other inconveniences. Wartime restrictions meant that the house could have only one telephone. The children took turns doing telephone duty, which meant staying within earshot of the ring. Cooks and maids were hard to find, and the children learned the techniques and disciplines of cooking and housework.
Sometimes guests seemed to forget how much work the old place was. There was one—an old friend—who always insisted on bringing his own linen sheets, pillowcases, and blankets when he visited. The sheets were so deeply hemmed that when folded down across the blanket, they extended fully halfway down the bed and, to satisfy these whims of his, a guest bedroom had to be dismantled and re-made on his arrival. Janet Auchincloss took on the chore herself. She has always been fond of dogs—she presently keeps two poodles and two pugs—but one of her poodles had a curious habit. Whenever he disliked a person, he registered the fact by wetting, rather pointedly, on some article belonging to that person. One evening, the special-sheets friend had come to Hammersmith Farm for the night and, while Janet Auchincloss was making up the bed with his linen, the dog suddenly leaped on the bed. The rest may be imagined. As much to save her dog’s reputation as her own as a hostess, Mrs. Auchincloss rose—like an Auchincloss—to the occasion. She seized a bath towel, dried the damaged pillowcase as much as possible, reversed it, and prayed that her guest would not turn it over before retiring. Apparently, he didn’t. When he left, he had a special word of praise for “your beautifully behaved dogs.”
To teach her children obedience to the unenforceable, Janet Auchincloss had her own methods. When her daughter Lee was about ten, the child was caught telling a fib. Her mother thereupon sat her down and began telling her the classic tale of George Washington and the cherry tree. When she got to the point of the story where George’s father asks him who cut down the tree, Mrs. Auchincloss paused and said, “Now, Lee, when his father asked him that, what do you suppose little George Washington answered?” Without a moment’s hesitation, Lee replied, “He said, ‘I don’t have any idea who cut it down, of course!’” “Why, Lee,” said her mother, “I’m surprised at you. That wasn’t the truth. No, he said, ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.’” “Well,” said Lee, “I think that was an awfully foolish thing for him to say when his father was so mad at him.”
Each of the two Bouvier girls had her own personality and her own style, and, though close as sisters, they were not a bit alike. Jacqueline was the quieter of the two, the more reserved and the more determined. She would spend hours over her sketch pad and in scrapbooks at Hammersmith Farm are some of the drawings she made as a child of the others in the family—drawings with such titles as “Mummy,” “Uncle Hugh,” “Yusha,” “Lee,” and “Me.” As a girl, Jacqueline Bouvier also seemed to be genuinely ashamed of the fact that she was bright. With boys, particularly, she went out of her way to make them think that they were smarter than she, and her mother would overhear her saying—to a young man who had flunked his math exam—“Oh, I’m terrible at math, too!” even though she was excellent at it. It was something her mother—a great advocate of “Be yourself”—never quite understood. “She was so afraid of being thought a bluestocking,” her mother says now.
Lee was the more volatile, a creature of sudden whims and enthusiasms. As a girl, she considered herself a champion of social justice, and her mother was always finding her on the telephone to city officials, or writing letters to Mayor LaGuardia to tell him what was wrong with New York and how to correct it. Once her older sister Jackie walked into a room to find Lee telephoning orphanages. She had become interested in orphans that morning, and was trying to find a group she could take with her to the theatre.
Though both girls were voted, by such authorities as Cholly Knickerbocker, “Number One Debutante” of their respective coming-out years, it was Lee Bouvier, not Jackie, who was considered the beauty in the family; Jackie, despite her best efforts to establish a contrary reputation, was known as the brainy, creative one. Then Jacqueline Bouvier married John F. Kennedy, and the Auchincloss family history entered on a new chapter. “This is the most beautiful spot on the Atlantic seaboard,” the President used to say as he stood on the terrace of Hammersmith Farm. With a wink at his mother-in-law, he would say, “Mrs. Auchincloss, don’t you think this is the most beautiful spot on the Atlantic seaboard?” Since she has had to deal with some of the housewifely problems of the place, she insists she has merely “put up” with it. Still, those were exciting days with the President spending holidays there, entertaining such guests as Prime Minister Nehru. The Auchinclosses’ guest book of that period reads like an international Who’s Who. To be sure, there were always crowds of tourists at the foot of the drive, and boats in the bay coming in close for a look, and the retinue of staff and Secret Service men who attended the President to be housed and fed. “Still,” says Hughdie Auchincloss, “I think we got the best of the deal. We got wonderful telephone service. All our calls, you see, went through the White House switchboard.” Friends, calling the Auchinclosses from down the street had to call via Washington, but it was fast. Mail delivery was speedier, too.
In the summer of 1963 Janet Auchincloss, Jr., whom many consider the most beautiful of Mrs. Auchincloss’s three daughters, made her debut at Hammersmith Farm. The long drive was lighted by flares and white Chinese lanterns, and in the big “deck room”—the main entertaining room of the house—the chandeliers were festooned with flowers and velvet ribbons. Outside, in the tents set up on the lawn facing the bay, everything was Venetian red, blue, and gold, with the center tent poles garlanded with swags of flowers and sparkly lights. Meyer Davis and his orchestra played from behind a thirty-foot red-and-black Venetian gondola filled with baskets of flowers, and the band and its leader were dressed as gondoliers. There were over a thousand guests, including seven foreign ambassadors, two United States Senators, a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, along with the Angier Biddle Dukes, the David E. K. Bruces, the Harvey Firestones, the Winthrop Aldriches, the Sheldon Whitehouses, and virtually everybody who was anybody at all in Eastern Society including, of course, dozens of Auchinclosses. It was the most festive and lavish debutante ball of that or any other Newport season anyone could remember. The President and Mrs. Kennedy did not attend, but they sent Janet the bouquet of flowers she carried, and announced that they would entertain for her at the White House during the Christmas season—a Christmas that did not come for President Kennedy.
Hughdie Auchincloss was lunching at the Metropolitan Club in Washington when the news of the event in Dallas was brought to him. He hurried downstairs to have it confirmed on television, then sped home and gathered his children around him. Later in the day, he and his wife went to the White House where they met Jacqueline Kennedy when she arrived. Still later, when the President’s body was brought to the White House, there was a short family service. At Mrs. Kennedy’s request, the Auchinclosses spent the night with her.
When John Kennedy was President, with Hughdie Auchincloss’s stepdaughter as his wife, the Auchinclosses were swept into a kind of international celebrity. All named Auchincloss in America found themselves in this curious position. They accepted it with good grace, even enjoyed it. They put aside the traditionally Republican Auchincloss political stance, and spoke out for the President and his party.* Now, in Mrs. Kennedy’s much publicized widowhood, her mother and stepfather have been flung into a share of the spotlight that surrounds the most famous woman in the world, and so have all the other Auchinclosses. Mrs. Kennedy’s position in the Auchincloss clan is now an odd one. Just as she seems somewhat out of place among the Kennedys, so does she seem out of keeping with the Auchincloss style and manner. She lacks the Kennedys’ Irish exuberance and competitiveness; she also blends uneasily with Auchinclosses who have, by tradition, been Scottishly conservative, understated, and aloof. What, for instance, would Aunt Ellie have thought of her in her miniskirt—Aunt Ellie, who disapproved of men and women swimming together in the same pool. It is clear that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy is, after all, her father’s daughter. Her sensitivity as well as her certain sentimentality, her sense of drama and her sense of fashion, her poise which often conceals her Gallic temper, seem to have come from the opposite side of the English Channel.
Auchinclosses have never been in the business of producing giant public personalities. Like the occasional Vanderbilt, Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Adams, or Saltonstall who has chosen a career in government or politics, the Auchinclosses have produced one such family member—James Coats Auchincloss, Republican Congressman from New Jersey for many years. He seems decidedly a maverick. To prove, however, that Jim’s political adventures were not entirely frivolous, Auchinclosses remind themselves that for twenty-five years Jim was a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and a member of its Board of Governors for eighteen. By nature reticent when outside the realm of “people we know,” the Auchinclosses now find Mrs. Kennedy’s face on the cover of every magazine.
On the ferry-crossing from Jamestown to Newport, Hammersmith Farm, smiling down on the bay, is one of the tourist sights. The little windmill guest house that Mrs. Auchincloss is building at the water’s edge is announced as “where Jackie stays,” though this is not really the case. Rubberneckers park outside the entrance to Hammersmith Farm with cameras, and some drive boldly up the drive itself, hoping for a glimpse of their beloved. Needless to say, this is a nuisance to Hammersmith Farm’s owners, nor are others in the family pleased with these developments. It is not that they are jealous of “the fuss,” as one cousin puts it, made over Hughdie and Janet. It is just that they are afraid the family is becoming famous for the wrong things. Auchinclosses were Auchinclosses, after all, long before Kennedys were Kennedys.
Life at Hammersmith, meanwhile, continues to be decorous and seemly. In the mornings, which Hughdie Auchincloss spends at his desk, slippered servants move efficiently through the sunny, airy rooms, speaking in whispers. Before lunch, Hughdie and his wife meet for a Daiquiri in the deck room. Then lunch is announced. After lunch, Hughdie may drive around Hammersmith in his blue Bentley, stopping to speak with his head gardener or his superintendent. Or he may sit for an hour or so at the water’s edge, fishing for mackerel. If there is a professional football game scheduled, he will head back for the deck room and the television set. Upstairs, his wife works at her desk. Both Auchinclosses nap before dressing for dinner, and at these times the house grows very still.
The house, too, now wears something of the air of a memorial. Framed, in the entrance hall, is the Presidential flag which flew from the lawn when the President visited, and photographs of him are everywhere—there he is with his wife, there with his children, there with Yusha Auchincloss’s twin sons. Upstairs, in the study off the room he used, is a desk with a bronze plaque listing the various bills he signed into law there. Everyone in the family speaks of him respectfully as “The President,” only occasionally slipping and referring to him as “Jack.” On the third floor, the children’s floor, the rooms of Yusha, Nina, Jackie, Lee, Janet, and Jamey are often empty now. The long hallway is lined with photographs of departed Auchinclosses. One is struck with a sad sense that the greatest days of the great house may now be past, or that its history must now enter another new phase.
Janet Auchincloss, Sr.—a handsome, vivid, slender and auburn-haired woman with a buoyant step and a quick smile who looks far too youthful to be a grandmother—may sense this too. In 1965, she embarked upon a new project. The old windmill, which once lifted water for the house, was standing idle, and she had an idea: why not move it down to the edge of the bay and remodel it? She and her daughter Jackie spent weeks hiking around the acreage at Hammersmith in search of the perfect spot and, when they thought they had one, the two women had themselves raised on a fork-lift tractor so they could inspect the view, as it would be, from the top. Working with walkie-talkies between the main house and a prospective site, she and Jackie tried to place the windmill where it would do the most for the house’s view. It was a familiar sight, that summer, Mrs. Kennedy and her mother—one woman, leaning from an upper window of the main house, gesturing and shouting directions, and the other, skirts blowing, perched high on the platform of a fork-lift, half a mile away. At last they settled on a site. A workman, helping to prepare to move the building, was using an acetylene torch. A gust of wind blew his flame under a shingle. The windmill caught fire instantly and burned to the ground.
But Mrs. Auchincloss is a woman of determination. Undaunted by the catastrophe, she decided to build a new windmill which became, in the process, quite a bit more than the old one was to be. There are four floors, with an elevator between—a large room for entertaining on the ground floor, a living-dining room on the next, a bedroom on the next and, on the top, a glass-walled studio room that takes in the entire bay and a generous portion of the Atlantic Ocean. Two kitchenettes and a sundeck are staggered between the floors. From now on, according to Mrs. Auchincloss’s plan, she and her husband will retreat for the summers into this diminutive, elegant, fairy-tale castle. The children and grandchildren may use the big house as they wish.
There are no outward signs that being the mother of the most publicized woman in the world has been a strain, but certainly it has been. Janet Auchincloss is often recognized and approached by strangers who, as often as not, are well-meaning, and who ask the question, “Pardon me, but aren’t you Jackie Kennedy’s mother?” Mrs. Auchincloss visibly stiffens before murmuring a polite, and poised, affirmative, and moving on. The publicity and the recognition that went with being connected to the White House, which the Auchinclosses once accepted, is now merely something to be endured.
There is a further matter that privately worries the family. “When,” asks one member, “will the Kennedy publicity begin to deteriorate and run downhill?” When, in other words, will it take on a yellow-journalistic cast of the “intimate-secrets-of-John-F.-Kennedy” variety? Alas, it has had a way of happening, following a decent interval, after the deaths of many other famous men, and a number of the family are now grimly steeling themselves for this kind of lurid and leering press.
The Auchinclosses’ distinguished brother-in-law, Wilmarth Lewis, feels that in most eventualities, Auchinclosses will emerge triumphant. Having married one, he has particular admiration for the Auchincloss women and their particular sense of balance and lightness. They have acquired this sense, he feels, partly through family tradition and inheritance, and partly through their education. This, of course, has been outwardly superficial—with the mandatory year in Europe—and consistently upper class. Women, by tradition, have gone to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, just as Auchincloss boys have traditionally gone to Groton, and, says Mr. Lewis, “Porter certainly isn’t the worst school in the world, but it’s hardly the best, either. And yet it has somehow been able to teach these girls to go to the heart of complicated problems—and to rise to occasions.” It teaches them, he feels, a sense of themselves, a sense of duty, of obligation, of responsibility. It teaches them that there is more to “being a lady” than manners, or Manner. It teaches them to tell what is important from what is not, what needs doing from what doesn’t. It supplies them with a certain toughness of fiber. It is this upper-class toughness that is so often mistaken for simple coldness, even arrogance.
Mr. Lewis cites the example of his late wife, Annie Burr Auchincloss, who, when the Second World War was declared, put down her needlepoint and her interest in collecting eighteenth-century prints, and went to work for the Red Cross and other wartime services. No previous education or training—no provisional year with the Junior League doing volunteer work—had prepared her for this. She simply was prepared, and did what needed to be done, providing leadership.
“In other words,” asked a friend, “there is something to be said for aristocratic values?”
Mr. Lewis looked briefly alarmed. “Oh, yes!” he said quickly, “But of course you must never call them that. An aristocrat would never call them that. The minute you use that word, the hackles rise.”
The crisis the Auchincloss family faced, in terms of Mrs. Kennedy, came as a result of the public’s clamoring guardianship of the young widow as a national treasure. The family wanted to return to lives of sedate, ritualistic predictability, respectable affluence, and grand reticence, to the kind of family who “one would never dream of speaking to without an introduction.” However Mrs. Kennedy’s marriage to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onasis should remove this glare of public light from the Auchincloss family and signal the return to its former position of being “reasonably” celebrated and Republican. As standard-bearers and standard-setters, conveyers of values that are particular to the American Social Establishment, the Auchinclosses, one realizes, will carry on like … well, like Auchinclosses.
Whether or not one is worthy of being considered an aristocrat—that word never to be used—depends, in large part, on how one conducts oneself in the face of adversity. When the chips are down, blood will tell. It is then that one is judged by how automatically, and how well, one obeys the unenforceable.
In The Late George Apley, the late John P. Marquand offered his portrait of upper-class life in Boston, and caused his hero’s Aunt Amelia to utter the statement: “Whenever I am depressed I remember I am an Apley.” To upper-class Boston, however, the remark was puzzling, and tended to cast doubt upon Mr. Marquand’s qualifications as a chronicler of the real upper class. Would a real upper-class person ever talk that way? As Marietta Tree commented not long ago, “Anyone who has to keep reminding herself what her family stands for can’t really be very secure.” A good point, to which Mr. Marquand, were he still with us, might have replied, “Touché.”
Upper-class values are not confined to any family, nor to any city. And yet Mrs. Tree recalls that the “first and only” time her grandmother ever slapped her was when, as a young girl, Marietta referred to an acquaintance as “very middle class.” After the slap came these stern, grandmotherly words: “There are no classes in America—upper, lower, or middle. You are never to use that term again.”
Mrs. Tree is eminently well-equipped to be called a member of the American upper class. She is a daughter of the venerable Peabody family of Salem; her grandfather was the celebrated Rector of the Groton School, and four other of her antecedents were on the school’s first board of trustees. She is related, by blood and marriage, to such great New England families as the Lorings, the Searses, the Lawrences, the Endicotts, and the Bowditches who, in turn, are married or related to such as the Higginsons, the Cobbs, and the Howlands who, in their turn, are related to Auchinclosses—a lacy network of interrelationships that floats outward from Boston and New York and Philadelphia over the entire continent. In addition to headmasters of schools, Mrs. Tree’s ancestors include a comfortable complement of Episcopal Bishops and New England Governors.
Mrs. Tree speaks of her family as “The people who built and administered the schools, universities, boys’ clubs and hospitals. They were the sinews of society. They gave generously of themselves for the public good and prudently lived on the income of their incomes. They valued educated women as well as educated men; daily exercise; big breakfasts; president Eliot; beautiful views; portraits by Sargent; waltzing (known as the ‘Boston’ in Boston); Harvard; travel; England; comradeship between the sexes; Patou dresses for ‘swell’ occasions; long correspondence with family and friends; J. P. Morgan; mahogany and red plush; and, most of all, they believed that if you tried hard enough, you could make the world a better place. And you must try.” Few better, or more succinct, lists of upper-class values have been compiled.
And yet, at the same time, Mrs. Tree resolutely insists that there is “no such thing” as an upper class in America, and that her family consisted of, most of all, “Good, hardworking ministers, teachers, and community people.” When the term upper class enters a conversation, she cites her grandmother’s slap, and the solemn words that followed it.
Is it possible that the wise and witty Mrs. Tree has missed what surely was her grandmother’s point, her grandmother’s lesson—which is that to call someone “middle class” is in itself very middle class? No upper-class person would do it. No upper-class person would ever admit that such a thing as “class” exists. Those who continue to deny Society, then, continue to confirm it—in generation after generation. On this firm foundation of paradox—not unlike those that have formed the bases of the world’s great religions—Society exists.
* Often called the “Other Rockefellers,” the “Greenwich Rockefellers,” and the “Best Rockefellers.” The descendants of William Rockefeller have generally tried to keep out of the spotlight which falls on the families of William’s brother, John D. While the Rockefellers of Pocantico Hills, in Westchester, have been known for wealth, piety, vast philanthropy, and a certain humorlessness, the Greenwich Rockefellers are known for their wit, good nature, and charm. They are the “Fun Rockefellers.”
* During the Kennedy campaign, Hugh D. Auchincloss telegraphed numerous friends who were prominent Republicans, urging them to support Kennedy.